"Our partner, Fujitsu Hokuriku Systems, challenged us to achieve our goal with their ICT. They put themselves in our shoes to fully understand our issues, and work in collaboration to solve them. This attitude influenced our decision"

The customer

Yokogawa Electric was first established in 1915 as an electric meter research institute. In 1975 it pioneered the development of distributed control systems, which for the first time in the world, could comprehensively control and monitor plant operations and manufacturing. Since sales began, Yokogawa has been recognized in the global market as leading company in its field. The company continues to provide innovative solution services by adding value for customers through activities that support power saving and the development of new energy based on its measurement and control technologies.

Yokogawa Electric is aiming to be the global first in control services following the establishment of their global enterprise foundation. In March 2013, the overseas sales ratio (consolidated) exceeded 60% and the overseas network had grown to 71 subsidiaries in 34 countries. The ICT infrastructure that supports this global strategy is the Yokogawa Global System (YGS).

“YGS is an infrastructure system with responsibility for the overall supply chain of global sales, accounting, manufacturing and distribution. The system has been implemented in 10 bases across seven countries since 2008 and continues to expand globally. Our information system department takes a top down approach to the construction and operation of YGS in order to identify how it can be best utilized. This is achieved by providing users with transparency into the system and standardized operations. Our YGS integrated storage platform forms a base for effective data storage and utilization. Due to growth, the platform urgently required greater capacity to store 2TB of data annually for the ERP system alone, as well as higher performance for uninterrupted data use,” explains Mr. Kitahara Taku, Corporate Department Information System.

The challenge

Yokogawa Electric needed to store 10 years’ of data and ensure efficient data management and usability. The data migration needed to be performed securely within a limited time frame.

The solution

Yokogawa Electric implemented the integrated FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS DX8700 system to support 10 years’ of storage using automated tiering and effective data utilization.

Data migration from multiple storage systems from different vendors was completed within the strict 8-hour timeframe which through pre-verification, a carefully developed recovery and contingency plan.